‘Is he unconscious?’ you ask the woman who follows you and looks at you kindly as-at someone akin to her.
‘No, he can still hear, but not at all well,’ and she adds in a whisper: ‘I gave him some tea to drink to-day — what if he is a stranger, one must have pity — but he hardly drank any of it.’
‘How do you feel?’ you ask him.
The wounded man turns his eyes at the sound of your voice, but neither sees nor understands you.
‘My heart’s on fire,’ he mumbles.
A little farther on you see an old soldier who is changing his shirt. His face and body are a kind of reddish brown and as gaunt as a skeleton. Nothing is left of one of his arms. It has been amputated at the shoulder. He sits up firmly, he is convalescent; but his dull, heavy look, his terrible emaciation and the wrinkles on his face, show that the best Part of this man’s life has been consumed by his sufferings.
In a cot on the opposite side you see a woman’s pale, delicate face, full of suffering, a hectic flush suffusing her cheek.
‘That’s the wife of one of our sailors: she was hit in the leg by a bomb on the 5th,’1 your guide will tell you. ‘She was taking her husband’s dinner to him at the bastion.’
‘Amputated?’
‘Yes, cut off above the knee.’
Now, if your nerves are strong, go in at the door to the left; it is there they bandage and operate. There you will see doctors with pale, gloomy faces, and arms red with blood up to the elbows, busy at a bed on which a wounded man lies under chloroform. His eyes are open and he utters, as if in delirium, incoherent but sometimes simple and pathetic words. The doctors are engaged on the horrible but beneficent work of amputation. You will see the sharp curved knife enter the healthy white flesh; you will see the wounded man come back to life with terrible, heart-rending screams and curses.
You will see the doctor’s assistant toss the amputated arm into a corner and in the same room you will see another wounded man on a stretcher watching the operation, and writhing and groaning not so much from physical pain as from the mental torture of anticipation. You will see ghastly sights that will rend your soul; you will see war not with its orderly beautiful and brilliant ranks, its music and beating drums, its waving banners, its generals on prancing horses, but war in its real aspect of blood, suffering, and death. . . .
1 The first bombardment of Sevastopol was on the 5th of October 1854, old style, that is, the 17th of October, new style. On coming out of this house of pain you will be sure to experience a sense of relief, you will draw deeper breaths of the fresh air, and rejoice in the consciousness of your own health. Yet the contemplation of those sufferings will have made you realize your own insignificance, and you will go calmly and unhesitatingly to the bastions.
‘What matters the death and suffering of so insignificant a worm as I, compared to so many deaths, so much suffering?’ But the sight of the clear sky, the brilliant sun, the beautiful town, the open church, and the soldiers moving in all directions, will soon bring your spirit back to its normal state of frivolity, its petty cares and absorption in the present. You may meet the funeral procession of an officer as it leaves the church, the pink coffin accompanied by waving banners and music, and the sound of firing from the bastions may reach your ears. But these things will not bring back your former thoughts. The funeral will seem a very beautiful military pageant, the sounds very beautiful warlike sounds; and neither to these sights nor these sounds will you attach the clear and personal sense of suffering and death that came to you in the hospital.
Passing the church and the barricade you enter that Part of the town where everyday life is most active. On both sides of the street hang the signboards1 of shops and restaurants. Tradesmen, women with bonnets or kerchiefs on their heads, dandified officers — everything speaks of the firmness, self-confidence, and security of the inhabitants.
If you care to hear the conversation of army and navy officers, enter the restaurant on the right. There you are sure to hear them talk about last night, about Fanny, about the affair of the
1 Among a population largely illiterate, the signboards were usually pictorial. The bakers showed loaves and rolls, the bootmakers boots and shoes, and so on. 24th,1 about how dear and badly served the cutlets are, and how such and such of their comrades have been killed.
‘Things were confoundedly bad at our place today!’ a fair beardless little naval officer with a green knitted scarf round his neck says in a bass voice.
‘Where was that?’ asks another.
‘Oh, in the Fourth Bastion,’ answers the young officer, and at the words ‘Fourth Bastion’ you will certainly look more attentively and even with a certain respect at this fair-complexioned officer. The excessive freedom of his manner, his gesticulations, and his loud voice and laugh, which had appeared to you impudent before, now seem to indicate that peculiarly combative frame of mind noticeable in some young men after they have been in danger, but all the same you expect him to say how bad the bombs and bullets made things in the Fourth Bastion. Not at all! It was the mud that made things so bad. ‘One can scarcely get to the battery,’ he continues, pointing to his boots, which are muddy even above the calves. ‘And I have lost my best gunner,’ says another, ‘hit right in the forehead.’ ‘Who’s that? Mitukhin?’ ‘No . . . but am I ever to have my veal, you rascal?’ he adds, addressing the waiter. ‘Not Mitukhin but Abramov — such a fine fellow. He was out in six sallies.’
At another corner of the table sit two infantry officers with plates of cutlets and peas before them and a bottle of sour Crimean wine called ‘Bordeaux’. One of them, a young man with a red collar and two little stars on his cloak, is talking to the other, who has a black collar and no stars, about the Alma affair. The former has already been drinking and the pauses he makes, the indecision in his face — expressive of his doubt of being believed — and especially the fact
1 The 24th October o.s. = 5th November n.s., the date of the Battle of Inkerman.
that his own Part in the account he is giving is too important and the thing is too terrible, show that he is diverging considerably from the strict truth. But you do not care much for stories of this kind, which will long be current all over Russia; you want to get quickly to the bastions, especially to that Fourth Bastion about which you have been told so many and such different tales. When anyone says: ‘I am going to the Fourth Bastion’ he always betrays a slight agitation or too marked an indifference; if anyone wishes to chaff you, he says: ‘You should be sent to the Fourth Bastion.’
When you meet someone carried on a stretcher and ask, ‘Where from?’ the answer usually is, ‘From the Fourth Bastion’, Two quite different opinions are current concerning this terrible bastion1: that of those who have never been there and who are convinced it is a certain grave for any one who goes, and that of those who, like the fair-complexioned midshipman, live there and who when speaking of the Fourth Bastion will tell you whether it is dry or muddy, whether it is cold or warm in the dug-outs, and so forth.
During the half-hour you have spent in the restaurant the weather has changed. The mist that spread over the sea has gathered into dull grey moist clouds which hide the sun, and a kind of dismal sleet showers down and wets the roofs, the pavements, and the soldiers’ overcoats.
Passing another barricade you go through some doors to the right and up a broad street. Beyond this barricade the houses on both sides of the street are unoccupied: there are no sign-boards, the doors are boarded up, the windows smashed, here a corner of the wall is knocked down and there a roof is broken in. The buildings look like old veterans who have borne much sorrow and privation; they even seem to gaze proudly and somewhat contemptuously at
1 Called by the English the ‘Flagstaff Bastion’.
you. On the road you stumble over cannon-balls that lie about, and into holes made in the stony ground by bombs and full of water. You meet and overtake detachments of soldiers, Cossacks, officers, and occasionally a woman or a child; only it will not be a woman wearing a bonnet, but a sailor’s wife wearing an old cloak and soldiers’ boots. After you have descended a little slope farther down the same street you will no longer see any houses, but only ruined walls amid strange heaps of bricks, boards, clay, and beams, and before you, up a steep hill, you see a black untidy space cut up by ditches. This space you are approaching is the Fourth
